In the previous post, I pointed out the surprisingly strong early backing that Obama has received from Wall Street, which raises the obvious question: Why would Wall Street invest so heavily in him? One reason is that the business sector always covers its bets so that whoever wins, they have ties to them. But another major reason is that the pro-war/pro-business interests in the US cannot get all that they want from Republican administrations. The Republican Party is too closely identified in the public mind with big business to overcome the public’s suspicion that they always are seeking to enrich the big moneyed interests at the expense of the poor. Some of the desires of big business can only be met by Democratic presidents and Congresses, who have managed to convey the impression that they are the party of ‘the little guy’, and thus can neutralize some of the suspicions and do things that Republicans cannot.
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Given my concerns about Hillary Clinton, one might think that I would be an enthusiastic Barack Obama supporter, but at this point I must say that I am somewhat underwhelmed by him. I have not been bowled over by his alleged charisma, perhaps because I almost never watch TV, preferring to read about events instead, and charisma is hard to convey with the printed word. I definitely prefer him to Clinton, but on many issues, it is hard to tell them apart. But the key difference with Clinton is that I think that Obama (unlike Clinton or McCain) is not (yet) completely in the maw of pro-war/pro-business party that rules the country, although the process by which those interests swallow up political leaders and turn them into zombie-like creatures that do their bidding seems dangerously far advanced in his case.
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(Due to the unexpected importance of Ohio in the primary process, I am pre-empting the economy series for three posts on the elections.)

Back in November 13, 2006, when Wisconsin’s US Senator Russ Feingold announced that he would not run for the Democratic nomination for president, I wrote the following:

“With Feingold’s departure from the race, we are headed closer to a nightmare scenario in 2008 where the two factions of the pro-war/pro-business party will send their most cynical and opportunistic and unprincipled representatives to vie for the presidency: Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain. The pundits will love them because they play the game according to the debased rules they understand, where the only things that matter are strategy and tactics, and principles are irrelevant.”

Now that the primary season is well underway, at least half of my prediction seems to have sadly come true, with John McCain almost certainly being the Republican nominee. It seems like only Barack Obama can prevent the full nightmare from occurring. The Ohio and Texas primaries on March 4 and the Pennsylvania primary on April 22 will play important roles in deciding who the eventual Democratic nominee is.
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(Today is the official day to commemorate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I am reposting (updated and edited) something I wrote two years ago.)

In reflecting on the life and message of Martin Luther King, I feel there is a need to resurrect an essential aspect of his message that he articulated during the last phase of his life. Over time, layers of gauze have covered this portion of his legacy and blurred the increasingly hard-edged and accurate vision that characterized the last years of his life.
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In my two posts titled Meet the Villagers (see here and here), I argued that the oligarchy that runs the US decide early on who they approve of to be political leaders and then use the media to make sure that everyone else is eliminated from the race early. The high-handedness of the media in deciding what views we should be exposed to was on extraordinary display when MSNBC first invited Dennis Kucinich to appear in the Nevada debate because he had met their criteria, and then at the last minute changed their criteria to exclude him. (I suspect that when they first set the rule about including only the top four candidates, they assumed that the fourth would be a Villager-acceptable candidate like Biden or Dodd or Richardson.) They thus ensured that issues like single-payer health insurance and the immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq and the closing of bases there (to name just a few issues) would not be raised in the debate.

Recall that I said that the Villagers want election campaigns in which there is a consensus amongst the candidates to support the issues that the oligarchy care about. We are almost there.

Now a January 11, 2008 Reuters article by Kevin Drawbaugh has actually asked corporate executives which candidates they like and fear and the results bear out what I said. Of the leading candidates, they like Clinton and McCain and Romney and think they can deal with Obama.

The corporate suits fear John Edwards most. In fact, the title of the piece is “Corporate Elite Fear Candidate Edwards.” Mike Huckabee is the most feared candidate on the Republican side. This is because although both their policy platforms are hardly radical, neither is strictly following the pro-business script that gets Villager approval.

The media has, as always, dutifully picked up on these cues, especially on the Democratic side. The Washington Post dismisses Edwards as “angry” (anyone who highlights and attacks the corporate control of US politics is almost invariably described as “angry” or as otherwise irrational) and insists that this is already a two-person race between Clinton and Obama. Unsurprisingly, the more overtly right-wing corporate mouthpiece Fox News also attacks Edwards.

But the best way to undermine a candidacy is by ignoring it, especially in the early stages, the way that the Edwards, Dodd, Biden, Richardson, Kucinich, and Gravel candidacies were largely ignored. If not for the televised debates, these people would have been largely invisible. Another way you eliminate those whom you don’t feel deserve to be in the race is to give extraordinary attention to trivial differences among the Villager-approved candidates so that all the oxygen is used up discussing absurdly unimportant issues.

For example, by focusing heavily on spats between Obama and Clinton (Did she ‘play the race card’?), and on trivialities (Did she really cry after Iowa? Is he secretly a Muslim?), and on topics like gender and ethnicity and Clinton’s ‘likability’ and even the way she laughs (!) rather than on policy issues, the media effectively avoid talking about other candidates and thus give voters the impression that this is now a two-person contest. This despite the fact that some polls suggest that Edwards is the Democrat most likely to beat any Republican in the presidential race, while Hillary Clinton fares much worse than Edwards and Obama.

As the pro-Democratic blog Firedoglake summarizes: “If Hillary’s the Democratic nominee, we could very easily lose to any likely GOP nominee. If Obama’s the nominee, he does OK so long as he doesn’t face McCain. But if Edwards is the nominee, we’re sitting pretty. Which, I suspect, is one reason why Big Media hates John Edwards so much and does everything it can to destroy him. (Speaking of which: KingOneEye at DailyKos pointed out this morning how the NYT is ignoring a key result of its own poll on the race — namely, that as more people get to know him, Edwards’ favorability rating keeps going up.)” Greg Sargent also notes a study that supports the contention that the media is underreporting Edwards.

On the Republican side the Villagers have not been able to narrow the contest as effectively, to focus just on McCain and Romney. Huckabee keeps bobbing up to the surface although they seem to have effectively buried Ron Paul’s candidacy, although the latter is doing as well as, or better than, Villager-approved candidates Fred Thompson and Rudy Giuliani who still get a lot of media play. It will be interesting to see if and for how long Huckabee can withstand the media pressure to disappear.

David Sirota tries to combat the “just a two-person Democratic race” narrative fostered by the Villagers:

For those of you who think the Democratic presidential nomination fight is just a two-way race between Obama and Clinton, check out this brand new poll from the Reno Gazette-Journal. Yup, that’s right – it shows the Nevada caucus race [which will be held on Saturday-MS] a three-way, dead heat with John Edwards right in the mix.

Interestingly, this poll comes right on the heels of the Establishment viciously ratcheting up its angry attacks on the Edwards candidacy. Late last week, we saw a Reuters story headlined “Corporate Elite Fear Candidate Edwards” detailing how Wall Street moneymen and K Street lobbyists are frightened about Edwards populist, power-challenging message against greed and corruption. We also saw self-anointed Democratic “expert” Lawrence O’Donnell pen a fulminating screed demanding Edwards get out of the race – not surprising coming from a man who made his name running the U.S. Senate Finance Committee – long the most corrupt, lobbyist-ravaged panel in all of Washington (somehow, running the U.S. Congress’s version of a pay-to-play casino now makes people credible “experts” in campaign strategy and political morality).

According to the nonpartisan Project for Excellence in Journalism, Edwards has long faced a media blackout – one that at least some honest media brokers like Keith Olbermann have noted. As I said a long time ago, that Edwards has even been able to compete in such a hostile environment is a testament to the power of his message.

The question we should ask is what the hostility and media blackout is really all about? I’d say the media’s behavior is motivated by the same impulses that moves lobbyists to whine and cry to Reuters and self-important bloviators like O’Donnell to publicly burst a blood vessel on the Huffington Post – the people who have gotten used to the status quo are truly terrified by any candidates who they really believe will change things and threaten their power and status. Edwards is just such a candidate – one who threatens to muck up what the media and political elite want to be a race between two “nonthreatening,” Wall Street-approved candidates. Obviously, it’s a three-way race at this very moment – whether the Establishment likes that or not.

Incidentally, this is why efforts to broaden the base of voters are almost always done by grass-roots activist groups working independently of the major parties. These new voters are unpredictable and hence undesirable to the Villagers. The pro-business/pro-war single party is quite comfortable with the way the current political system works since it gives a huge advantage to the status quo.

POST SCRIPT: Religion and politics in the US

British comedian Pat Condell gives us his take on this topic, in a clip he calls “Pimping for Jesus.” Condell’s home page cheerfully describes his attitude to religion: “Hi, I’m Pat Condell. I don’t respect your beliefs and I don’t care if you’re offended. Cheers.”

On my return from Sri Lanka last week, I read the back issues of the Cleveland newspapers and found that a big story was the vicious beating of a middle-aged white man by a group of six black teenagers who had accosted him while he was on a walk in his neighborhood. The man was saved from possible death because of the alarm raised by a resident (who is a faculty member at Case) who had observed the assault from his home front window and raised the alarm, which caused the attackers to flee.
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The fourth time I was empanelled was for a criminal case involving charges of felonious assault where the defense said that it would argue self-defense. Once again, there was an oral voir dire, which included questions about whether we had ever been involved in any physical altercation.

It was during the voir dire that I ran into a problem. One of the prosecuting counsel asked if the jurors would be willing to convict a person on the facts of the case even if they felt the law under which the person was being prosecuted was unjust. It was clear that he expected you to answer ‘yes’ to this question. We have all seen at least some courtroom dramas where the judge instructs the jury on the law to be applied and the jury is asked to judge based only on the facts of the case, and not to judge the validity of the law itself.
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By a coincidence, while writing and posting my series on the law and religion in public schools, I was also called for jury service and spent the better part of the week of November 5, 2007 in the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court in downtown Cleveland.

I feel strongly that the jury system is one of the greatest inventions of modern society and has been the foundation for democracy and creating and preserving freedoms. So I feel that to serve on a jury is a privilege and do not resent doing my time on the jury though it does involve some minor inconveniences and disruptions in work and home routine.

This was the third time I have been called for jury duty but I have yet to actually sit in on a case. For those not familiar with how it works, at least in Cuyahoga County where I live, when you are called for jury duty to the Common Pleas Court, it is not for a particular case but to be part of a large pool of jurors that serve many courts. So much of the time is spent waiting until your name is randomly called as needed if a case cannot be settled and should need to go to trial.
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Ever since election day on November 6, 2007 news reports in Cleveland have been obsessing over the fact that the results were delayed by a couple of hours due to a systems crash that required the backup to kick in.

I am puzzled by this obsession with speed in elections. Why is there such a rush to get election results out so quickly? This drive for speed seems particularly paradoxical in the US where election campaigns are dragged out longer than in any other country and where there is a long time interval between voting day and the newly elected person actually taking office. New office holders typically take over at the beginning of the following year, allowing for a two-month transition period. The new president does not take the oath of office until January 20.
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